The horrifying AAA debt-issuance chart - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/07/15/the-horrifying-aaa-debt-issuance-chart/ <comment><USER2> Author doesn't really understand the situation.

The problem, which started becoming visible in 2001, is that in the aftermath of the "dot-com boom", the ratings agencies starting rating a lot of things AAA that were not, in fact, AAA. That is not "an excess of overcaution". In fact it was an exploit of the banking/finance system, that went like this:

        -- lots of places are required by law or regulation to only invest in AAA securities, because they/the public don't want to lose any money.  They have a LOT of money to invest.
        -- but they don't check the shit themselves
        -- they depend on a rating agency
        -- ratings agencies are paid by the issuers
        -- they are exploitable
        -- bribe the rating agency to give my shit a AAA rating, and now I can sell a ton of it
        -- offer the investor a slightly greater than AAA return, and they love it
        -- everyone is happy: rating agency is bribed, investor is getting better returns than expected, and I can sell all the shit I can package up
        -- until it all falls apart.

And the far right side of the chart is just a continuance of the same thing: our shit fell apart, what should we do? Well, the easiest thing is to bribe the politicians to take our private debts and turn them into public debts. And so it happened. That big tall lavender bar in 2009 is the dark purple lines from a few years prior....

None of this has anything to do with an excess of caution or with AAA debt being more systemically dangerous than other types of debt. The blogger here almost grasps what is wrong:

> "That's possibly the most horrifying bit of all: it simply defies credulity > for anybody to be asked to believe that more than half the bonds issued in > any given year are essentially free of any credit risk."

but he skips past the correct answer, which is that the ratings agencies have been suborned.

<comment><USER3> jellicle is correct the ratings are complete bs. If AAA actually meant something the US would have been downgraded years ago. AAA means there is no chance of default no whatever so ever. It should only be reserved for countries with little or ideally no debt. The fact that our politicians and media are openly talking about default means that AAA does apply to the US but it does. So it means nothing.

<comment><USER4> If a country has no debt, what security is being rated AAA?

<comment><USER5> OK, let's look at structural deficit, GDP growth, and Net International Investment Position.

NIIP is interesting. Despite the US's huge debt, they have a reasonable NIIP of about -25% (I think). So the money is mostly there. It's mostly in private hands, but as long as the private sector is OK, the government will keep collecting taxes.

The obvious problems with the US are its health system (more public funding than countries with free health, but terrible value for money), its military deployments (the military can be an OK if they use it to drive high-tech growth, but actually deploying it very expensive), its prison system (they tend to lock criminals up for a little too long, and they have way too much crime for other reasons).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The author argues that AAA debt is dangerous because it breeds complacency because it is considered risk-free. It strikes me that this is begging the question of how all these debt instruments can carry the same grade and do so so consistently. Is it not the case that AAA debt is dangerous because most of it is probably not really AAA?

I thought we established a long time ago that the ratings system is broken, this is just another symptom of that illness that no one is willing to even try to cure.

<comment><USER7> That's his point. There is no conceivable way that even a large fraction of that debt is AAA. What instead appears to be happening is a vicious circle:

* The finance industry engineers new ways to massage riskier debt into AAA products

* The market eagerly devours all the new AAA debt, building new business models and expanding previous ones based on the increased availability of risk-free products, thus

* Sparking demand for more AAA debt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> An example of why not all AAA debt is truly AAA grade:

"As it turned out, triple-A-rated mortgage bonds stuffed with bad subprime mortgages were considered very low risk" Source: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/magazine/sheila-bairs- exit...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/magazine/sheila-bairs-exit- interview.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all)

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder; is it not increasingly obvious that rating agencies are fraudulent by nature/rent-seekers writ large?

<comment><USER7> Maybe, but BRK and the US Treasury are meaningfully AAA. There is clearly a class of AAA risk that means something, and a (far larger) lower tier of AAA risk that merely rides the coattails.

<comment><USER10> The US Treasury is not, by definition, AAA. It can print money at will, but it cannot guarantee that that money will have value.

<comment><USER11> Isn't all of its debt dollar-denominated?

edit: Now that I think about, it isn't. They have inflation-indexed bonds as well. The more they print money, they bigger their debt grows!

[http://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_tips_glanc...](http://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/products/prod_tips_glance.htm)

<comment><USER12> Yes, but which agency determines the rate of inflation? :)

<comment><USER13> At the end of the day, politicians could mandate that the government statisticians lie about the inflation rate (make it artificially low to lower CPI-index bonds payout rate).

But the currency markets would not be so easily fooled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Saying "AAA bonds will cause a crisis" is like saying "Homeowners' mortgages caused the mortgage crisis". They're an essential part of the situation, but the actual cause was the misrepresentation of the riskiness of the securities, due to capture of the rating agencies by their customers, the securities issuers.

Is there a term analogous to "regulatory capture", for capture of non- government organizations like rating agencies by the subjects of their ratings?

</comment><comment><USER15> Yet another non logarithmic graph of money, sigh. When will people learn.

<comment><USER16> This sounds like an interesting insight. Could you elaborate?

<comment><USER15> Compare the difference between 1000 and 2000, vs 4000 and 8000. In both cases it's double, but in the second case the difference appears to be 4 times as large.

This graph is linear, so it makes it look like the jump from 4000 to 8000 is more significant than the jump from 1000 to 2000, but actually it's not. It's identical.

<comment><USER17> How is it identical? One has a difference of 1000 the other of 4000. We all know that $4000 is much more than $1000.

The only thing they have in common is that both amounts have doubled, but I think there is a huge difference between 1000 to 2000 with 1 million to 2 million although they both have only doubled.

<comment><USER15> No, actually. With money the only thing that matters is the degree of change, not the simple number.

The change from 1 million to 2 million is much more important than the change from 99 million to 100 million.

Try an experiment: take a calculator or a spreadsheet. In one case start with 1000 then keep doubling it. In the other start with 1 million and keep adding 1 million.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If contracts and regulations require AAA-rated securities, then AAA-rated securities will appear to match the demand.

As the author rightly points out: we have too many groups requiring AAA-rated securities and not enough real AAA stuff to go around, so most of the AAA ratings are going to be unreliable.

<comment><USER19> _If contracts and regulations require AAA-rated securities, then AAA-rated securities will appear to match the demand._

I believe that this is what is happening, but the argument that demand for AAA securities by overcautious investors is the root of the issue makes it sound like all of our problems could have been avoided by curtailing the demand itself- in this case, by encouraging investors to take on more risk (don't be overcautious!) and be willing to purchase lower-quality securities.

As an investor, shouldn't I be able to choose what level of risk I'm willing to accept? And isn't it the job of rating agencies to provide accurate information so I that I can make an informed decision as to the level of risk I'm taking?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If everyone switched from buying 6-month Treasuries to buying 3-month Treasuries, debt issuance by the U.S. Treasury would double in one year, so there is not enough information in the article to merit an "Oh no," but I guess the OP had a deadline to meet.

</comment><comment><USER21> It isn't clear to me why AAA rated bonds represent such systemic risk, the article says the following:

"They breed complacency and regulatory arbitrage, and they are a key ingredient in the cause of all big crises, which is leverage."

Is the author arguing that these should all just be rated below AAA and as such be accompanied with higher interest rates? This would obviously depress the rate of issuance because companies would be less inclined to take the terms (at least in theory). This makes sense to me, but doesn't necessarily indicate that AAA rated bonds inherently have systemic risk as the author states.

Perhaps I'll read the article a second time through.

<comment><USER7> From the article:

 _Then look at the green line. Triple-A debt wasn't a huge part of the bond market back in the early 90s, but for the past decade it has invariably accounted for somewhere between 50% and 60% of total global fixed income issuance. That's possibly the most horrifying bit of all: it simply defies credulity for anybody to be asked to believe that more than half the bonds issued in any given year are essentially free of any credit risk._

That seems like the nut. It's _prima facie_ obvious that much of what is called AAA can't be AAA; it almost mathematically beggars the definition of AAA.

Meanwhile, all kinds of contracts, regulations, and instruments rely on AAA ratings to prevent money that can't reasonably be put at risk from going into e.g. mortgage bonds.

<comment><USER21> Then I'm inclined to disagree at another portion of the post which seems somewhat contradictory to the point:

"it wasn't an excess of greed and speculation which led to the financial crisis, but rather an excess of overcaution"

The greed then exists in alternate areas of the system. It isn't AAA bonds that are the issue, it is the fact that lesser bonds are being rated as AAA. Why are they being rated that way? The ratings companies have conflicts of interest and were... (wait for it) greedy.

In addition, calling this an "excess of overcaution" is laughable, if I can get decent returns from a "risk free" investment, that isn't cautious, it is logical.

<comment><USER22> Hmm,

I guess I agree but the thing is that "greed" and "over-caution" actually very similar. Over-caution is greed for income without risk.

For example, Bernie Madoff's appeal wasn't based on offering income level that no mutual fund could match but rather offering an apparent combination of income and stability that no mutual fund could match (10%/year as reported each quarter).

<comment><USER21> I think there are some differences, but regardless within the context of this article the author states:

"it wasn't an excess of greed ..., but rather an excess of overcaution"

I disagree with this statement, and clearly, based on your definition here, this can't be true either. Unless, saying "is wasn't greed it was greed" actually makes sense. Obviously I don't think you believe that, I'm just pointing out a major issue with the article as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Naked Capitalism weighs in on this article as well:

[http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/07/felix-salmon- misreads...](http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/07/felix-salmon-misreads-aaa- bond-demand-to-say-overcaution-caused-crisis.html)

</comment><comment><USER24> In what way do AAA-rated products "breed ... regulatory arbitrage." What does that mean?

<comment><USER25> See tptacek on this thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2768921>

A lot of regulation tells big often state-based institutional investors like retirement plans and university funds that they have to invest X% in AAA rated investments.

Demand for AAA rated products creates not just financial wizardry that spawns more AAA products from riskier products, but the increasingly powerful finance industry/lobbyists pressure government officials (usually appointed representatives from the finance industry) to make this easier...if not transparent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This seems relevant: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GSXbgfKFWg>

</comment><comment><USER27> It is either fear or greed.

</comment><comment><USER28> Some items to keep in mind:

1\. War on Terror and TARP are large portion of the current USA deficit, probably 80% or higher.

2\. Over-issuance of AAA ratings will come back to bite as it has to be rolled-over at some point.

3\. TARP spending direct result of not controlling the security class known as derivatives ...precedent last time we had to assert Federal control to correct market excesses in securities as 1929-1930 with the SEC act. IN other words we could force security exchanges to outlaw derivatives to bring order/stability back but anyone receiving bank lobby money will not broach that subject.

<comment> kai-zer False...

TARP is expect to cost the taxpayers, $25 billion. A small price to pay to avert total financial ruin.

[http://cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=11980&zzz=41404](http://cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=11980&zzz=41404)

<comment><USER29> If you give me a loan, then as it expires I take out a new loan to pay you back, would you say that you've made money from the arrangement? I would say that you haven't, as if I default the second loan you still take a net loss across all our transactions. However in the case of TARP, many TARP loans were rolled over into non-TARP loans, without the principal being returned at all.

We could also discuss whether it is a good idea to subsidize the losses of some parts of the financial and automotive industries but not others, whether this is really conducive to a healthy economy based on competition, and whether the incentive structure created by handing bags of stolen money to anyone who can credibly threaten to damage the economy is a good one, but this probably isn't the place to do it.</comment></comment></comment>


Random thoughts on a PGP based social network - <AUTHOR> http://zemanel.eu/random-thoughts-on-a-pgp-based-social-network

<comment><USER2> FWIW - Doesn't load for me on either of the platforms I have easy access to right now.

<comment><AUTHOR> direct link: [http://www.slideshare.net/MyCatStoleMyPPT/pgp-based- social-n...](http://www.slideshare.net/MyCatStoleMyPPT/pgp-based-social- network)</comment></comment>


Introducing Increment - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/blog/increment <comment><USER3> Feedback in case anybody from stripe is tuned in: I'd love to read these stories but not 6 around the same theme all at once. Like that it will take years (at your rate of publication, 4 times per year) to cover even the basics of running a complete operation. Please consider mixing different aspects for a single issue, both in the name of variety and to cover some ground in a reasonable time.

Other than that: thanks for publishing this, I've often wondered why there isn't a central repository (like a wiki or something like that) with the various recipes you can use to tackle a given problem and what works and what doesn't in practice.

<comment> shawn-furyan I'm willing to ride with this format. Magazines tend to be disposable except for when they have a particularly impactful in-depth piece or themed issue. This format is all themed issues with in-depth pieces. It also allows Stripe to focus resources more effectively on the supposed goal of delivering evergreen authoritative recommendations. This is something that is sorely lacking in the current environment where anything over 6-months old is often unusable.

The internet currently provides more breadth in the area than a single person could possibly need. I laud the focus on depth.

<comment><USER4> This format sounds like HBR for software professionals. Sounds great to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Susan Fowler joined Stripe to found and edit Increment and the first issue > launches today.

BTW, this is the same Susan Fowler of ex-Uber fame: [https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on- on...](https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very- strange-year-at-uber) Congrats on the new position, Susan!

I'd be interested in hearing what it's like moving from a code-focused job to a content-focused job. Seems like a very unique shift!

<comment><USER3> That would be nice, as well as a 'one year in' perspective on the cultural differences between those two companies. Getting the company culture right is a lot harder than getting the tech right.

<comment><USER6> She joined stripe in Jan 2017 and left uber in dec 2016.

<comment><USER3> Yes, so that would have to wait for a bit. Still, it would make for very interesting reading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Side-topic alert.

Stripe is my top design company these days. Just looking at their landing pages [1], [2], I'm deeply impressed by their effort on making the web beautiful.

Huge inspiration for me. Kudos to their front-end / design teams.

1: [https://stripe.com/atlas](https://stripe.com/atlas) 2: [https://stripe.com/connect](https://stripe.com/connect)

<comment><USER8> Except I can't read this blog post on my Nexus 7, Android, Chrome. (Both sides are cut off.)

<comment><USER9> You pesky android users are always complaining about my beautifully designed pages. They look great on my iPad. There must be something wrong with your droid /s

<comment><USER10> Not to rain on your parade, but it also cuts off on the right side when shifting from portrait to landscape on iPhone SE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thanks Stripe for advancing the industry by generating this content. I'm impressed with how broad they interpret their mission of increasing the GDP of the internet. Their Atlas program is the best example.

BTW on [https://stripe.com/about](https://stripe.com/about) I only found "Help us build the universal payments infrastructure of the internet." but it is listed on [https://stripe.com/press](https://stripe.com/press)

Disclosure: I'm interviewed in one of the pieces [https://increment.com/on- call/the-benefits-of-transparency/](https://increment.com/on-call/the- benefits-of-transparency/)

<comment><USER12> Off-topic, but that about page is pretty awesome. Is that everyone who works at Stripe? If so--kudos, what a nice touch. Most start-up "About Us" pages just show smiling head shots and bios of the founder and senior execs, as if they're the only people doing anything in the company.

<comment><USER13> It's more that if you put all of your employees up there, they start getting poached.

It says a lot about Stripe's workplace culture that they're not afraid of this.

<comment><USER12> > It's more that if you put all of your employees up there, they start getting > poached.

I hope you're joking, because that seems like a very silly reason in the age of LinkedIn and recruiter databases. It's probably very easy to find a relatively up-to-date list of employees for any given company out there.

My guess is that most small companies don't do this simply because they don't even consider that it would be a nice gesture to publicly recognize more than just the top execs.

<comment><USER14> Speaking from experience, it's actually worries about poaching, letting the competition know the size of your various teams, and possibly privacy for employees too.

You are right that with things like LinkedIn you could probably get a lot of this information, but it's enough of a hurdle that execs still think it's worth it.

<comment> shawn-furyan Well, then this is superstition on the part of those execs. LinkedIn is the one tool that every recruiter uses. They are more likely to map out your employee network on LinkedIn than to even visit your company website at all (much less count on it for having accurate up-to-date information).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was surprised to see no discussion of an oncall bonus or compensation in the first issue of Increment. This is a practice which is uncommon but not rare in the industry; Google, for instance, offers generous compensation to developers with a serious oncall shift.

It would be interesting to see a discussion of this topic, but I suppose this is expected if a publication is published by a company rather than by laborers directly.

<comment><USER16> Could you go into more detail? It seems like the goal of the magazine is "practical and useful insight into what effective teams are doing."

Is there any evidence that on-call bonuses or compensation affects the quality of work that a team does? Maybe there is, but most of the research I've seen doesn't support that conclusion.

<comment><USER14> I think employee retention would be a much bigger concern. On-call work is very disruptive and I suspect many developers would be quite unhappy to be asked to do that without some form of compensation. Compensation seems like an extremely important topic when trying to put together an on-call program.

<comment><USER17> Coversely, you can't dump all of the on call work onto your Ops/DevOps team unless you're compensating them appropriately (or the team is large enough that on call rotations are infrequent). Otherwise, say goodbye to retention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Great work - love reading this stuff.

As a sort of mini-rant - with so much 'incident transparency' with Slack, Email, Dashboards, Hangouts, etc high-sev issues can devolve into all hands events if you haven't nailed the culture as well. These can be intensely political - where you got random managers/execs who haven't touched code in years in the Slack channel trying to look engaged and competent offering suggestions like, "Have we tried rolling back the release?" and the smart engineers who could actually fix the problem are afraid to do anything because everything they do is broadcasted to the entire company. It's relatively easy to adopt the tools and processes of successful tech companies but it's hard to get the culture.

<comment><USER19> After a few years of experience, I'm convinced that "getting the culture right" and later "not fucking up the culture" are the hardest parts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I thought this might be _the_ micropayment service that I've been waiting for. Turns out, it's a newsletter.

<comment><USER21> I was hoping it was some declining balance product as well!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Any chance of getting this in kindle/e-reader compatible format? The website is beautiful, but reading long-form content is so much nicer on e-ink.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, there needs to be at least an RSS feed. An email subscription is just going to get lost in my inbox and otherwise I'm never going to see when new issues come out. Once there's an RSS feed, there are a variety of services which will read the feed and send it to a Kindle.

<comment><USER24> [https://increment.com/feed.xml](https://increment.com/feed.xml)

(for most readers, putting just the domain should auto-detect)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I need a physical copy of this 'magazine' so I can read it on the pooper. :) Thanks Stripe.

</comment><comment><USER26> Impressed by Stripe's marketing strategy. With the acquisition of IndieHackers.com and now this, they're taking content marketing to the next level.

</comment><comment><USER27> One of the things that stuck me when reading Susan Fowler's Uber article, was just how well written it was. It gives me a lot of hope for this magazine.

</comment><comment><USER28> Not sure what to make of this, given the redundant, monochromatic content about being on-call. It doesn't appeal to me. A magazine format is not appropriate for such a narrow focus. You're not going to gain the continuing readership without a sufficiently broad appeal.

Also, the introduction of putting down the rest of the industry while simultaneously extolling your own ideas is very off-putting, especially if we haven't heard them yet. The strength of the Stripe brand matters not; I do not know who you are.

That said, Stripe is a great company and I'd love to hear more about how they are doing things. But please, if you want me to pay attention to you, sans the hubris self-congratulatory tone.

</comment><comment><USER29> There are multiple ways to successfully organize teams of software developers.

What matters most is that the choices are consistent and coherent.

It's nice to read about practices that work in one environment, but you have to keep in mind how they integrate in to the big picture of all of the choices.

For instance, some teams branch everywhere, for everything. Which is fine, and some people do it to great success.

Some teams develop at head, for everything. Which is fine, and some people do it to great success.

But the tools you need to build around those two approaches are totally different. Reading about the tools and techniques, without understanding how they all fit together, and trying to adopt them because they work for other people, could be a recipe for disaster.

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting, Will Larson [1] was also a manager at Uber, probably worked with Susan in the past.

[1] : [https://www.linkedin.com/in/will- larson-a44b543/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-larson-a44b543/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Any plans to have a physical copy with subscription?

<comment><USER32> Or a PDF.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Why package articles up into a quarterly "magazine"? That doesn't make much sense on the Web. Why not publish the articles in a blog?

</comment><comment><USER34> I like that the "Ask an Expert" about on-call emergencies section has an answer from Phil Calçado (Director of Product Engineering at DigitalOcean)

Made me chuckle.

[1] [https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/update-on-the- apri...](https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/update-on-the-apri..). (for anyone who missed them nuking the production db).

<comment><USER3> Every company I've _ever_ seen, including the best ones has made at least one mistake of that calibre (or much, much worse) in their history. In most cases you never heard about it because it happened early enough that hardly anybody noticed. The only reason you know about this one is because DO is large enough to be newsworthy, or you might even be a customer of theirs.

The hard part of running a start-up is to _get_ to that point where if you fuck up enough people will notice that it makes the press.

<comment><USER34> No criticism of DO was implied and I agree every company has such issues (I locked myself out of most of the servers the other day because I deleted id_rsa instead of id_dsa and then had to walk home to get my back up drive).

It was just amusing _timing_.

<comment><USER3> > No criticism of DO was implied and I agree every company has such issues (I > locked myself out of most of the servers the other day because I deleted > id_rsa instead of id_dsa and then had to walk home to get my back up drive).

Oops :)

> It was just amusing timing.

Ah ok. Your link doesn't work btw.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Netflix never pre-announced their series of extremely useful videos because they were just useful and people watched them in droves often being top results on Hacker News. Youtube + articles are nice for that sort of thing and I don't see a reason to deviate from that if the content is actually worth viewing.

</comment><comment><USER36> Some of the best content of this type I've seen is from the ACM. If you are not a member I really encourage you to join.

<comment><USER37> Which part of the ACM? They have like 10 magazines, 50 journals...and much, much more.

<comment><USER38> [http://queue.acm.org/](http://queue.acm.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I love how Stripe does so many things that provide value to the developer community from their awesome blog posts to their open source retreats and now finally to this magazine. They're a model to me of how to earn the good will of your users through providing authentic value.

</comment><comment><USER40> This seems like a cool idea. I do wish there was an RSS feed available for me to add to my feed reader, though.

<comment><USER41> There is! [https://increment.com/feed.xml](https://increment.com/feed.xml)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I love how Stripe is transitioning into a services company for internet companies, particularly startups.

</comment><comment><USER43> Unrelated q: is increment.com an off-the-shelf magazine theme or custom development?

<comment><USER44> I would be shocked if something from Stripe was using an OTS theme.

<comment><USER45> The styles and animations are quite similar to the Stripe dashboard, so I would assume it's all internal styling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It seems like a different view on Agile.

</comment><comment><USER47> Nice, I'd been wishing for a "devops" book full of case studies - <USER2> situations teams were in and how they handled it. Occasionally you get an engineering blog post, but most of those are just boasting unilaterally about a solution, and not any critical discussion of the problem or the myriad of bandaids most of us have to deal with.

This might be a step in the right direction.

<comment><USER48> You may like Build Quality In.

"The interdependent disciplines of Continuous Delivery and DevOps are of immense value to an organisation, but they are hard. We have seen Continuous Delivery and DevOps work in the wild, as have other practitioners. We want to help people on their own Continuous Delivery and DevOps journey, by sharing the experiences of those who have done it – what worked, what didn't, and the highs and lows of trying to build quality into an organisation."

[https://leanpub.com/buildqualityin](https://leanpub.com/buildqualityin)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> rip high scalability blog

</comment><comment><USER38> what an unfortunate name. sounds like excrement.

<comment><USER50> my thought exactly, memo to marketing :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is awesome. Is there an email form where I can sign-up to get an alert when a new issue is released?

<comment> dorian-graph On the bottom of the Increment homepage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Would really prefer Stripe to release more payment options like Bitcoin or Paypal, or adding more countries and their more local payment options.

<comment><USER53> Bitcoin is supported! [https://stripe.com/docs/bitcoin](https://stripe.com/docs/bitcoin)

We are also expanding our coverage, you can sign up to get notified when we open up access to different methods here: [https://stripe.com/payments](https://stripe.com/payments).

<comment><USER52> I'm really sorry for my comment. Turns out I didn't check Stripe for a while. Bitcoin is now completely supported yes, and I see support for SEPA and other payment options incoming. Great guys!

<comment><USER53> No need to apologize, it's not that obvious from the marketing materials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Will Stripe discuss their choice to selectively enforce their own TOS? I'm sure many start-up business would like to know how to pick and choose when they enforce their own TOS</comment>


Go's Declaration Syntax (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.golang.org/gos-declaration-syntax

<comment><USER2> For those less familiar with C I'd like to point out that a common solution to the "function pointer hell" in C is to alias the types with typedef, although one might argue it's more a workaround than a real solution.

So the last example of function pointer taking a function pointer parameter and returning a function pointer could look something like:

        typedef int (*return_fp_t)(int, int);
        typedef int (*param_fp_t) (int, int);

        return_fp_t do_stuff(param_fp_t a, int b) {
          /* ... */
        }

It requires coming up with new type names but it remains pretty readable in my opinion. Also if the prototype of one of the function changes (which is pretty common in my experience) it's easier to modify it since it's only declared once.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not mentioned in the article is the typedef problem in C.

Early C didn't have typedef, just struct. The grammar was LALR(1), and context-independent - knowing the syntax and the reserved words, you could parse C.

Then came typedef. Now, to parse C/C++, you must know the names of types. So, to parse a C/C++ file, you must read and interpret all the #include files first. This makes it hard to write tools that work on C/C++ source.

This isn't a problem with the declaration syntax of the Pascal/Modula/Ada/Go line of languages, where declarations have the order "x int" instead of "int x". So "go fmt" doesn't have to have all the dependencies just to clean up the indentation.

<comment><USER4> Go has a similar problem: function calls and type conversions share the same syntax (or sufficiently the same syntax). If you see `x(t)` in a Go file, there's no way to know if that's a function call or a type conversion without some semantic information. Also built-ins, which also look like functions, come in to add an extra layer of difficulty.

<comment><USER5> You can interpret that as calling a coercion function that converts a value from one type to another type. Python actually works like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think C declaration syntax is a bit of an acquired taste --- it looks confusing at first but once you "get" it everything falls into place and it feels completely natural. Arguments that it is difficult to read because it is not "left to right" contrast with the fact that the expression syntax is not "left to right" either in most programming languages; 2 + 3 * 4 parses as 2 + (4 * 3) in most languages that use this syntax.

Also worth mentioning that the "clockwise/spiral rule" that this article links to for reading C declarations is actually _wrong_ , as Linus Torvalds helpfully points out here: [https://plus.google.com/111049168280159033135/posts/1ZhdNwbj...](https://plus.google.com/111049168280159033135/posts/1ZhdNwbjcYF)

This is probably a better article for understanding them: [http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/reading- cdecl.html](http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/reading-cdecl.html)

<comment><USER7> You know. I was working on a project last day and a horrible bug happened where the timing system broke and spammed my console and corrupted my database.

You know what instigated it? A precedence error.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It appears to me that, in the examples shown, the advantage of Go in terms of clarity is only in the existence of the "func" keyword.

<comment><USER9> dont forget about ease of implementation as well...

<comment><USER10> Many times I want to program in C or try to debug some open source apps but I'm always reminded why I didn't touch C/C++ since high school: macros, #include, CONSTANTS, long_identifiers, ugly castings everywhere and cryptic function pointers with the dreaded clockwise spiral rule. I still wonder how the world would look like today if instead of C++ we would have had a C v2 binary compatible with C but with type safety, interfaces and syntax similar to Go, or even this c2lang.org.

<comment><USER11> D?

<comment><USER10> D is a better C++. My feeling is that many people wanted just a better C (a portable & extensible assembler with a good standard library?).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't mind the declarator syntax in C so much. What I _do_ mind is the way some things are implicitly converted. For example: in

       char buffer[10];

the name "buffer" is a pointer to the first element of the buffer. This always feels like a hack, because "buffer" is an array, not a pointer to an element. I'd rather write &buffer[0]. This also feels like a hack when the buffer is coincidentally of size 0, and buffer[0] does not exist. So I'm just left with the feeling that something is missing in the language.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, or that the declaration syntax of pointers are "intended to be a mnemonic". It's syntactic sugar that, instead of being a convenience, simply misleads you. C is a language where you need to know what's going on and because of these weird decisions knowing how things work actively hinders you when writing code.

int p; type nameOfInstanceOfType;

int *p; notType notNameOfInstanceOfType;

How about something sane like: "pointer p = pointer(int)" or even Scalalike "pointer[int] p"? Pointers aren't so bad really. I think a lot of the hate for them is because the syntax begs you to fuck up. And inevitably you do. I mean, I just type random stuff until I get no warnings and things look like they work. Literally. That's how I program. How many asterisks here? I dunno, I'll just try zero through three and see if any of those work...

<comment><USER14>
        int* p;

Follows the Type NameOfVar pattern, though of course it breaks for multiple simultaneous declarations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This hits home, I have spent many evenings designing a language that is semantically equivalent to C++ (in fact, it's made to transpile to C++11) but with a LALR grammar (using just flex and bison). Glad to read that none other than Rob Pike agrees with many design choices in my language :)

</comment><comment><USER16> Rob Pike gave some details and historical footnotes about this and many other decisions during the evolution of Go.

[http://confreaks.com/videos/3419-gophercon2014-opening- day-k...](http://confreaks.com/videos/3419-gophercon2014-opening-day-keynote)

</comment><comment><USER17> How does Go's syntax compare to Pascal and other C contemporaries?

</comment><comment><USER18> I wish they'd have done arr int[] instead. int[] or int* always made much more sense to me as being the type.

</comment><comment><USER19> f func(func(int,int) int, int) func(int, int) int

It makes sense, but at the same time it reminds me of something from the esoteric top list at 99-bottle-of-beer.net.

</comment><comment><USER20> One of the main reasons is because Go syntax is designed for fast compilation.

<comment><USER21> I'd like to see the impact of different grammars in compilation time, which I suspect are small.

C++ compilation is not slow because of the grammar, but because of things like multiple includes</comment></comment>


Bitcoins spike up 20% in last 4 days - <AUTHOR> http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg5ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv

<comment><AUTHOR> How long before the mainstream financial press picks up on this price action?</comment>


Show HN: Need some help on my resume - <AUTHOR> Hey guys, I recently graduated and am having trouble getting callbacks for a phone interview.  In the last two months I have been on only two technical interviews (one coding and one design), and while I technically passed (according to the interviewers), I have a feeling they went with someone with more experience.
I really need your help.  If you have the time, I would like some advice on how to edit my resume.  Thanks!
Here is the link:  https://charlotte.craigslist.org/res/6775893373.html <comment><USER2> Here are some must-haves in your engineering resume: [https://myresumeseed.com/engineering- resume/](https://myresumeseed.com/engineering-resume/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Remove objective. The employer doesn't care what you want. They have problems in search of problem solvers. Write a short paragraph detailing your strengths, achievements, hard skills and soft skills. Use the job descriptions and openings you apply to as the form of your career objective. This is considered a US-centric best practice.

My background: I run a professional career coaching service for global career seekers in Shanghai, China. All the best.

</comment><comment><USER4> Suggestion: Move the work experience up so first, education comes after work experience. Don't call it volunteer work, you did work for an organization that I suppose has someone who will recommend you. List skills in a skills section so that recruiter can focus quickly. If you built a content management system I suppose that means skills used on that project include HTML5, CSS, maybe some client side scripting?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll definitely readjust my resume according to those recommendations. Really appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Objective, the "reputable" part rubs me the wrong way.

Maybe say something like entry / first position where can learn / be mentored / grow skills</comment>


Leading Architects Defend Hated Buildings - c-slice http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/05/t-magazine/architects-libeskind-zaha-hadid-selldorf-norman-foster.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0 <comment><AUTHOR> From the article: "It's legendary for being the most hated building in Paris. I want to defend it not because it's a particularly beautiful tower, but because of the idea it represents. Parisians panicked when they saw it, and when they abandoned the tower they also abandoned the idea of a high-density sustainable city. Because they exiled all future high rises to some far neighborhood like La Défense, they were segregating growth. Parisians reacted aesthetically, as they are wont to do, but they failed to consider the consequences of what it means to be a vital, living city versus a museum city. People sentimentalize their notions of the city, but with the carbon footprint, the waste of resources, our shrinking capacity, we have no choice but to build good high-rise buildings that are affordable. It's not by coincidence that people are going to London now not just for work but for the available space. No young company can afford Paris. Maybe Tour Montparnasse is not a work of genius, but it signified a notion of what the city of the future will have to be."

I can't help but mentally find & replace Paris -> San Francisco.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just _wish_ there was some neighborhood like La Défense where 'all future high rises' in the Bay Area are exiled, where people prefer a vital, living, high-density, sustainable city to the preservation of the aesthetic of their sentimental notions of the city.

<comment><USER2> Also, it's a false dichotomy that we must have either no development, or a building everyone (other than the architect himself) hates.

For most of history, architects sought a graceful balance between art and practical considerations. It seems to be a recent development that they have split into separate groups, one of which focuses solely on cutting costs, and the other of which focuses solely on building monuments to their own genius.

<comment><USER3> I wish I could find a link, but I recall years ago an interview on NPR with an architect that designed some building in LA (for paying parking tickets or something). Anyway, during the interview he accidentally admitted to not actually caring about the people that would end up using the space.

He then followed up by back-pedaling of course, but I've always remembered that as a moment when my cynicism about "modern" architecture felt validated.

<comment><USER4> You may be interested in the Alexander/Eisenman debate[1], if you've not encountered it before.

On the one side, an architect who believes in designing buildings largely as a means of communicating artistic messages—even, and perhaps especially, designing the building to make people _uncomfortable_ [2], because to make a building that comforts and reassures is a bit like lying about the state of the world, or doing a broader disservice by reinforcing the status quo. Buildings as statements, buildings as jokes[3], even.

On the other, an architect who finds this view practically psychopathic, since, after all, _people will live their lives in these places_. Buildings, in his view, should serve people over communicating a message and, above all, should _please_ the humans who will look at them and crawl around in them.

[1] [http://www.katarxis3.com/Alexander_Eisenman_Debate.htm](http://www.katarxis3.com/Alexander_Eisenman_Debate.htm)

[2] [http://socks-studio.com/img/blog/eisenman- alexander-01-800x6...](http://socks-studio.com/img/blog/eisenman- alexander-01-800x600.jpg)

[3] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Eisenman#/media/File:Grea...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Eisenman#/media/File:Greater_Columbus_Convention_Center.jpg)

<comment><USER5> >On the one side, an architect who believes in designing buildings largely as a means of communicating artistic messages—even, and perhaps especially, designing the building to make people uncomfortable, because to make a building that comforts and reassures is a bit like lying about the state of the world, or doing a broader disservice by reinforcing the status quo. Buildings as statements, buildings as jokes, even.

Yeah, that's pretty much the premise of brutalism [1]. Actually I think there's a place for that kind of thing and some of the best examples in London are really awe-inspiring and interesting places to hang out (e.g. the National Theatre, the Barbican). But of course there are some 'concrete monstrosities' as well.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture)

<comment><USER6> I don't think that brutalism goes as far as that. It does try to be 'honest' but it does not deliberately try to be uncomfortable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We finally managed to get rid of this monstrosity last year in Chicago: [http://www.landmarks.org/images/ten_most_2011_press/Prentice...](http://www.landmarks.org/images/ten_most_2011_press/Prentice%20Women's%20Hospital.jpg).

Also relevant: [http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/the-7-most-heinously- ug...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/the-7-most-heinously-ugly- government-buildings-in-washington#.xbYDyMOxBW) ("There are many gorgeous buildings in D.C. Unfortunately for us, in the '60s and '70s, the federal government only hired architects with early onset glaucoma.")

<comment><USER8> some more images of brutalist buildings in chicago (including the prentice hospital):

[http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/5667743710/campbell...](http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/5667743710/campbell- u-s-courthouse-annex-chicago-illinois)

[http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/8260917974/prentice...](http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/8260917974/prentice- womens-hospital-chicago-illinois)

[http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/2935927750/laborato...](http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/2935927750/laboratory- for-geophysical-sciences-chicago)

[http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/8300999834/raymond-...](http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/post/8300999834/raymond- hillard-homes-chicago-illinois-1966)

<comment><USER9> A few years ago, two bank robbers managed to escape from the MCC (your first picture) by climbing down a rope made from sheets. The building (across the street from our old office) is, if anything, even more forbidding in person. Still blows me away.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, that would take some stones for sure

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I know people hate Centre Pompidou but I do not share that hate. As a child my parents took me there many times and for years I would have wild, beautiful architectural dreams about it. It's what made me realize that architecture is not just a historical thing but something that people who are living in the present can do as well, and that it is something that can be shocking and beautiful at the same time.

<comment><USER11> There is a great story I heard about the architects winning the competition. The jury had to do an inspection of their offices to ensure the architects were established enough to take on the project. So Rogers & Piano hired out a floor of an office building and got all their friends to 'staff' it for the week the jury was visiting.

I can't understand why anyone would hate this building, I would love to visit it. But beyond personal preference, the success of the building is not merely about beauty but in how it functions both practically and phenomenologically. Judging architecture on looks alone is like judging, i don't know, twitter for its logo.. The pompidou centre made a large plaza based on classical proportions ie.the same size as the façade—in an area of paris without public space. And with the symbolism of the inner workings being exposed—transparency was a strong political statement to which the public responded.

Rogers:"The whole idea of Pompidou was that it is a place for the meeting of all people. And the success of it was that the French took it over and it became the most visited building in Europe."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I remember when Melbourne wanted to build a new 'city square' sort of area, which required knocking down an existing building. The building was the Gas & Fuel Corporation Towers, which was a pretty boring orange-brick high-rise[1]. A Melburnian all my life, I'd never heard anyone posit an opinion on the building, good or bad, in person or in media. It was boring. It wasn't pretty, but it was just there.

But then they wanted to knock it down, and out came a media campaign where all the newspapers were talking about how ugly it was and what a blight, and suddenly people were ferociously hateful towards it. "Don't you _just hate_ that building?" Well, no. And neither did you until you read about it in the paper. The weird thing was that the campaign was unnecessary (IMO) because people didn't care one way or another. It's not like people treasured the aesthetics or it had some historical tie...

They replaced it with a building that looks like a pile of glass at the recyclers [2]. Admittedly it's not boring, but neither is it attractive.

[1][http://www.walkingmelbourne.com/building465_gas-and-fuel- cor...](http://www.walkingmelbourne.com/building465_gas-and-fuel-corporation- towers.html) [2][http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Federatio...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Federation_Square_%28SBS_Building%29.jpg) [2a][http://www.loftoncollins.com.au/images/gallery/800px- Federat...](http://www.loftoncollins.com.au/images/gallery/800px-Federation- Square-Melbourne.jpg)

<comment><USER13> Likely a pre-emptive strike. You'd be amazed what people will find they love when given an opportunity to be against something. People are lazy and stupid, and opposition rarely gets called to account, so it's a magnet for the cowardly self-righteous.

I've lived in places where old houses were moved to get around opposition to their being demolished. On their new locations they were allowed to rot, and no one cared. _Preventing_ building anything new is interesting and fun for the kind of Puritan mind that lives in mortal fear that someone, somewhere, is building something new. Once you take away the locus of prevention--in this case the "love" of the old building that activists would have discovered had it not been preempted--they get bored and move on to something else.

<comment><USER12> It's hard to think that the people would have loved those buildings (two local iconic landmarks were less than 100m away), but you raise a good point in that perhaps it was about drumming up support for the replacement, as in " _anything_ but that!".

Also, I wonder if there wasn't a high-level political interest in keeping the buildings around, and drumming up public discord over them might have helped seal the backroom deals?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Having grown up just down the road from the second building on this list and having tried to navigate its dilapidated, maze-like corridors and awkwardly arranged "open" spaces, I can testify to its horrendous design. It routinely shows up on these types of "most hated" lists both nationally and globally for good reason.

I wish I could understand the mindset of the original architect or, better yet, the local bureaucrats back in the day who thought it was a great idea to build something so large seemingly modeled on a random stack of toddler's play toys.

Now it just serves to suck the county coffers dry due to ludicrously exorbitant maintenance costs (I mean, come on, "80 roofs?"). A soon-to-be- demolished, barely-used monument to bad government decisions and a complete lack of foresight of the late 1960's and early 1970's.

<comment><USER15> What you're describing reminds me a lot of Padelford Hall at University of Washington, another product of the late 60s.

([http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/june07/content/view...](http://www.washington.edu/alumni/columns/june07/content/view/69/39/))

It was awful, actually several "wings" in one building. It was possible to get locked out of the building on a walkway between two wings, with no other exits. You would sometimes have to go through one person's office to get to another office.

The theory when I was a student there was that university construction in the late 60s was obsessed with dealing with civil unrest - psych buildings with riot-proof windows, admin buildings with confusing layouts, an open square covered in bricks that get slippery when hosed down, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nobody defending the brutalist city hall building in Boston, I see...

> I somehow think that if you could populate the Plaza with more gardens, and > make it feel more part of everyday life — which they've tried to do with > farmers' markets and using the basin for ice skating — then it wouldn't feel > so hostile.

Seems eerily familiar to the sentiment surrounding the plaza by the city hall in Boston.

<comment><USER17> For some reason, people seem to be opposed to brutalism. Personally, I love it... the powerful, stark lines, clean geometry, abstract shapes. ([http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/](http://fuckyeahbrutalism.tumblr.com/)). It sounds like this building is disliked more for its painful layout though.

<comment><USER18> It's almost always because they're almost all expensive maintenance nightmares decaying and crumbling to dust and rubble after just a few years of use resulting in unpleasant, dirty looking buildings and public spaces around them.

I would be highly surprised if even 10% of brutalist era buildings survive their first 50 years without being torn down.

They're almost universally poorly designed and built, feeling more like a parking garage or a public restroom, with interior floor layouts based on mental hospitals or mazes.

There _are_ beautiful brutalist buildings. But I'd argue that even only a small percentage of those on the fuckyeahbrutalism blog would be considered so by the public. FYB even calls out City Hall in Boston as an example of great architecture, but it's pretty much reviled by anybody who's even come in cursory contact with it and the surrounding square. There's lots of terrible public spaces on that blog to be honest, clever photography is what makes most of them passable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I was very surprised Albany's plaza was on the list. Having grown up there I have many memories of staring in awe at its monolithic towers as they soar up from the plaza. I always really liked it and the plaza's great. They put shows on there and small festivals I believe.

<comment><USER20> I like it to.

I would much more expect to see Boston's Government Center on the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The Zaha Hadid, Ada Tolla, and Norman Foster seem to have the connecting thread of visibly stained concrete, making them look dirty on top of any other aesthetic flaws.

</comment><comment><USER22> What legacy will we pass on, what heritage will we build if all we do is imitating the past? Why don't we go and burn old books in our libraries and paintings in our museums because we think they're 'ugly'? Heritage is more that today's sense of prettiness.

</comment><comment><USER23> Apparently no one wanted to defend 432 Park.

<comment><USER24> Ugh. Is anyone going to live there, or is it a money-laundering/storage machine for investors?</comment></comment>


The Federal Reserve has enormous power over who is president - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/01/13/yes-the-federal-reserve-has-enormous-power-over-who-is-president/

<comment><USER2> Wonkblog's headline is pretty clickbaity -- there's really not much to see here.

Technically it's true that the federal reserve has a lot of control over who is elected president. But, contrary to the headline's implication, the article doesn't argue that the fed can intentionally engineer electoral outcomes. The fed controls elections only because monetary policy has a significant effect on the economy, and the nation's economic performance significantly effects presidential elections. Bad monetary policy -> bad economy -> change in political party occupying the white house. On this definition there are many agencies that "have enormous power over who is president."

I suppose the Fed chair and other officials could _engineer_ an electoral outcome by sabotaging the economy, but this seems pretty far fetched and the article does not suggest that this occurs.

<comment><USER3> The Fed can also use bad monetary policy to add short-term gains to economic development while sacrificing the long-term health of the economy. So, they can use the tool both ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For a very interesting commentary of the immense power of central banks, I'd recommend the documentary "Princes of the Yen", a film adaptation of Richard Werner's[1] book of the same name.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_MAY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5Ac7ap_MAY)

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Werner](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Werner)</comment>


Game Theory and the Dark Knight [spoiler warning] - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2008/07/game_theory_and_the_dark_knigh.php

<comment><AUTHOR> This scene immediately took me back to college econ. Anyway, I found it an interesting twist in that both parties knew they could possibly be saved. I also found Deebo's decision to be rather altruistic, bc I would've hit that button so fast...</comment>


The True Size of Africa (infographic) - <AUTHOR> http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/the-true-size-of-africa/ <comment><USER2> I'm puzzled why this one keeps popping up. I'm 34, and I had it hammered into me in geography classes that Africa was the second-largest continent, second only to Asia. And yet, people seem amazed by this.

I'm vaguely reminded of the story about a guy in NYC whose French coworkers asked him about the best directions to the Grand Canyon - they wanted to drive over to it that Saturday.

ETA: Mind, the linked projection correction is nice. I _thought_ France, Germany, and Spain looked ridiculously large in that first one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Common errors contain information by their being common, and in this case I think it's pretty cool information. Africa is rendered grossly smaller than life in our minds due to a confluence of two bugs: 1) the usual 2D mapping techniques distort scale (e.g., see google maps), and 2) our internal representation of geo-size seems to implement a spatial compression on places we have less information about.</comment></comment>


Live Current Media to develop Cricket.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/17/live-current-media-signs-a-50-million-deal-for-exclusive-online-rights-to-indian-cricket/ After reading the TC article, it seems that focus is being shifted towards the development of Cricket.com. Are you guys planning to integrate the two or have your efforts been repositioned towards the development of Cricket.com?<p>When the news that Auctomatic was acquired was released, several here thought that the acquisition was solely a method of getting a web dev team, and wasn't so much about the growth of  Auctomatic. Reading this article makes me feel somewhat the same... <comment><USER2> We're still building product on Auctomatic. I helped out on cricket.com as I saw the immediate opportunity (and I had the most cricket knowledge in the LCM team). It's going to be spun out as its own company, with its own funding and CEO.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> After reading the TC article, it seems that focus is being shifted towards the development of Cricket.com. Are you guys planning to integrate the two or have your efforts been repositioned towards the development of Cricket.com?

When the news that Auctomatic was acquired was released, several here thought that the acquisition was solely a method of getting a web dev team, and wasn't so much about the growth of Auctomatic. Reading this article makes me feel somewhat the same...

<comment><USER3> _Reading this article makes me feel somewhat the same..._

Does the article say the auctomatic team will be developing the cricket.com site?</comment></comment>


'Cats' gets day-one patch in theaters - <AUTHOR> https://kotaku.com/cats-is-getting-patched-like-a-video-game-1840595607 <comment><USER2> Analysis from a VFX supervisor: [https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/ee7m0t/cats_from_a_vfx...](https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/ee7m0t/cats_from_a_vfx_perspective/)

Original Hollywood reporter article: [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/universal-notifies- th...](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/universal-notifies-theaters- cats-is-being-updated-improved-visual-effects-1264689)

<comment><USER3> The reddit post uses the word "shop" a few times in a way I'm not familiar with. Specifically, "all over the shop" apparently meaning "not appearing consistent with the rest of the scene". Does "shop" have a technical meaning here?

<comment><USER4> It's synonymous with "place" in that use case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps ironically, my kids called around to find a theater that _didn 't_ have the patch yet. Apparently their only interest in this stinker was seeing the goofs...

</comment><comment><USER6> You know behind this was a VFX team saying they couldn't hit the deadline with given constraints, and a manager who didn't listen

</comment><comment><USER7> Newer thread with more comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21864259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21864259)

</comment><comment> Jean-Philipe I wonder why they went the VFX route at all. Why not just have the dancers wear costumes and makeup?</comment>


Toyota Unintended Acceleration and the Big Bowl of "Spaghetti" Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.safetyresearch.net/2013/11/07/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-the-big-bowl-of-spaghetti-code/

<comment><USER2> Wow, this article is a blast from the past -- I first heard the phrase "spaghetti code" back in the 1990's!

According to Wikipedia [1], the phrase has been around since 1978. And there's also ravioli code, lasagna code, spaghetti with meatballs code, and macaroni code.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_code](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_code)

</comment><comment><USER3> Amazing. Critical life systems development is overlooked quite often to meet schedule/cost constraints. Standard SDLC is many times ignored by many firms... not on purpose .. but in need to deliver. I appreciate this post... received $125 check from toyota, will likely not cash it.</comment>


New Research Suggests Solar System May Have Once Harbored Super-Earths (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.astrobio.net/also-in-news/new-research-suggests-solar-system-may-have-once-harbored-super-earths/ <comment><AUTHOR> Paper: "Jupiter's decisive role in the inner Solar System's early evolution"

[https://authors.library.caltech.edu/55970/](https://authors.library.caltech.edu/55970/)</comment>


How to document a Python API - <AUTHOR> http://blog.shir0.fr/2018/01/document-API-python-en <comment><USER2> With docstrings and most probably Sphinx. So? What of it?</comment>


Why I like Golang's interfaces - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@theburningmonk/why-i-like-gos-interfaces-2891adf2803c <comment><USER2> I've been writing quite a bit of TypeScript recently (which works similar to Go in this regard), and I must say I've become quite a fan of structural typing.

Especially when you have features like union and intersection types (which Go doesn't have), you can really mold the structure into whatever you need (i.e. to fit whatever data model you're working with), and be very productive without having to come up with weird inheritance hierarchies "just because".

It'd be nice to have the option to explicitly enforce nominal typing in specific places (maybe with its own keyword), but for most cases, structural typing seems good enough so far.

<comment><USER3> I admit the syntax is less than ideal (especially with gofmt), but I believe adding two interfaces to an interface definition is equivalent to union:

        func myrw(rw interface { io.Reader; io.Writer }) {
            rw.Read(nil)
            rw.Write(nil)
        }

[https://play.golang.org/p/D-lJ1pL3MZ](https://play.golang.org/p/D-lJ1pL3MZ)

<comment><USER4> Not really, it's equivalent to a product type.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Since the author likes both F# and structural typing, he might be interested in OCaml. F# took a lot of stuff from OCaml, but avoided both the object system and most of the module system, which both feature different flavor of structural typing.

In both case, as opposed to Go interfaces, they are actually safe (downcasting is forbidden, upcasting is checked at compile time) and the OCaml language has very good type inference, type annotations are not needed.

</comment><comment><USER6> The thing that tripped me up was you can't pass lists of interfaces across function boundaries. It's confusing when you're starting out

<comment><USER7> Could you post an example of what you're talking about? Passing slices of interface values works just fine. [https://play.golang.org/p/9CWzdnRb8U](https://play.golang.org/p/9CWzdnRb8U)

Is this what you mean? Trying to pass a []fooint as a []Fooer doesn't work: [https://play.golang.org/p/dmFfr0Exnk](https://play.golang.org/p/dmFfr0Exnk) \- that doesn't work in many languages, which is sad, but is for reasons that make sense if I think about what it would actually be doing under the covers: an interface value needs to store type information and/or a pointer to some kind of function pointer table, so you'd have to recreate that for each list element if you change the type of the list.

<comment><USER8> Also, a []Fooer supports the operation of storing any element assignable to Fooer, whereas a slice []fooint does not support that operation, so it makes sense that a []fooint cannot be used anywhere a []Fooer can.

<comment><USER7> That is a nice way of putting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Have any go developers run into issues where an interface is satisfied where it shouldn't be due to name conflicts?

<comment><USER10> what do you mean?

<comment><USER7> I think they mean accidentally satisfied interfaces.

<comment><USER10> i was hoping they'd have an example to point to, can't imagine this being a huge problem but i'd be happy to be proven wrong.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Oracle vs. Google - Problems in Discovery - <AUTHOR> http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110206222954641 >>Quite a lot to digest, eh? You'd have to be a developer with some experience with Java and/or Dalvik to know who has the stronger argument, but I'm not one, so I'll leave it to you. But at its core, what we are seeing is Google saying, in effect, that Oracle is the plaintiff. It has to tell what it is complaining about enough for Google to know how to defend itself. And so far, its position is that it can't really go forward in discovery revelations unless Oracle gets more specific on a claim by claim basis, telling Google which Android devices are infringing. And just because there's Android code in a public repository, that doesn't prove that the code "has in fact been implemented and/or used in third party devices". That's the missing piece, from Google's perspective. Oracle so far is saying, if I've understood their claims, and not having their answers to Google's interrogatories, I might not have it fully, that all of Android is infringing the patents, all devices that run Android from 2008 onward. Stating it is to see what the problem is, I think. In any case, we can see why they need the judge to intervene and tell them who has to cough up specifics first and/or to what degree. Although how he will know in such a technical dispute is a little hard for me to see. I'm struggling, not being a developer, and I know he has in earlier cases we've covered made clear that he's not a programmer either. But he surely knows the law, and that is what he'll try to apply, and I don't doubt that it's why he set up a meet and confer for the parties prior to the hearing. He's hoping to encourage them to work it out themselves, if at all possible. <comment><AUTHOR> >>But at its core, what we are seeing is Google saying, in effect, that Oracle is the plaintiff. It has to tell what it is complaining about enough for Google to know how to defend itself. And so far, its position is that it can't really go forward in discovery revelations unless Oracle gets more specific on a claim by claim basis, telling Google which Android devices are infringing.

>>Oracle so far is saying, if I've understood their claims, and not having their answers to Google's interrogatories, I might not have it fully, that all of Android is infringing the patents, all devices that run Android from 2008 onward. Stating it is to see what the problem is, I think. In any case, we can see why they need the judge to intervene and tell them who has to cough up specifics first and/or to what degree. Although how he will know in such a technical dispute is a little hard for me to see.

</comment><comment><USER2> Good description of Google's defense, but light on detail of Oracle's claims.</comment>


Give Your Apps a Backbone(.js) - <AUTHOR> http://www.joezimjs.com/javascript/give-your-apps-a-backbone-js/ <comment><USER2> Heads up. AngularJS is getting ready for its 1.0 release after moving this year from a 20%-time Google developer's project to a well-resourced one with full-time developers. It's going to really shake this space up.

</comment><comment><USER3> YUI3's APP framework is also a good and IMO a better option.

<comment><USER4> On what grounds do you say that?

Not necessarily disagreeing, I've never used YUI3, but I'd love to hear more about it.

I've recently been dabbling in Backbone and, frankly, I'm struggling with lack of documentation. A better documented "competitor" in this space would likely win me as a user.

I was hoping it would be Ember/Amber, or something to that extent, but that doesn't appear to be significantly better documented either.

What do you consider YUI's strengths / weaknesses vs. Backbone? (Please say documentation).

<comment><USER5> How would you like the documentation to be improved over the resources that currently exist at Backbonejs.org?

<comment><USER6> "Lack of guidance" is the way I'd describe it. The documentation is great, but it didn't help to steer me away from making architectural decisions that don't work well with Backbone when I was doing my first experiments.

<comment><USER5> To follow up -- what sort of architectural decisions were those?

<comment><USER6> I'll try to think of examples and come back to it tomorrow.

For now: One thing that I'm still not clear on is when to wrap .get/.set.

Should I always write my own getters/setters and only use .get/.set internally? Right now I'm only wrapping them when the attributes need special processing, which leads to an inconsistent-feeling API.

<comment><USER5> I'd lean towards _never_ , unless you have a case with really special semantics.

For run-of-the-mill attribute massaging, I'd just define a new method on the model specifically for that purpose. eg.

        book.loadFromAmazon(amazonJSON)

<comment><USER6> Hmmm, interesting. Here's a concrete example:

I've got an 'Organization' model and a 'Person' model. I want to use them interchangeably in some templates, so I need to be able to get their names in a consistent way.

An Organization just has a 'name', but a Person has a 'first_name' and a 'last_name'. I've been using a 'displayName' method to encapsulate the difference; would it make more sense to do something like:

        var Person = Backbone.Model.extend({
          initialize: function() {
            var name = this.get('first_name') + ' ' + this.get('last_name');
            this.set({ name: name }, { silent: true });
          }
        });

<comment><USER7> .displayName() seems like a perfect encapsulation IMO.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists - <AUTHOR> http://www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks

<comment><USER2> Kind of a freaky read. He put work into showing how someone would do it, not just claiming someone could do it. Excellent job.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would have been a little better read if he had chosen reading material that wasn't middle-of-the-road stuff that might make the bestseller list or be assigned reading in school. How about the Turner Diaries (Timothy McVeigh's favorite) for the Right, books by actually Communists or anarchists for the left, maybe some deep ecologists? And some Loompanics-style how-to books about weapons, killing, and identity theft instead of the silly children's book he used: [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0830606041/applefritt...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0830606041/applefritter-20)

Is this just because hardly anybody has those books on their wishlist and he wouldn't have had anything to write about?

<comment><USER4> The actual reading material he chose is immaterial. Much more important is that the tools required to build his system were trivial and yet he had a wide array of search parameters to choose from. There is a lot of power there.</comment></comment>


No one cared about my startup until we gave away... breadshoes? - <AUTHOR>

I'm the founder/CEO of Ratify, an upcoming app that connects citizens with politicians. I thought it would be really cool to run a contest where we gave away a meeting with the President. Turns out no one else thought it was cool! We ran the contest for 1 day and received anemic traffic and shares.
So on day 2 we added a second contest for a pair of freaking BREADSHOES, and randomly assigned new users to one of the two contests. It's only been live for a short very time (as I write this), but our conversion rate has effectively doubled, and our traffic is increasing by the minute.
(Once the contest concludes, I'll post a full report on our data.)
Morale of the story? Things go viral on the internet for no good reason, so maybe you should add some "no good reason" to your product.
Here's the link to the contest: http://www.ratifyapp.com/contest
Thanks for listening to me! <comment><USER2> I think you need to kickstarter a breadshoes campaign. Not out of actual bread but fluffy slippers that look like bread.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the cool insight. goodluck</comment>


87-year-old holocaust denier sentenced to 10 months in jail - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/holocaust-denying-nazi-grandma-gets-10-months-jail-102136724.html <comment><USER2> What level of disagreement with the holocaust narrative gets one thrown in a metal cage in Germany?

If somebody said that about 4 million Jews died during the years of WWII instead the popularly promoted 6, or even just 1 or 2 million, would that be illegal? What if somebody said that about 1 million Jews died specifically at Auschwitz instead of about 4 million, would that be illegal? What if one disputed some details such as methods of execution or other popularly promoted facts? Would it be illegal to conduct historical research and come to the conclusion that 5 million jews were shot and 1 million were gassed instead of the other way around?

To avoid any issues: I'd please request precise notes from the thought police on what opinions are allowed to be expressed or thoughts are allowed to be disagreed with.

Thank you

<comment><USER3> Except of course the law doesn't work that way for any other situation.

What, precisely, are 'fighting words'? What, precisely, is 'libel'? 'Fair use'? 'Porn' and 'obscenity'? 'Commercial speech'?

In this case, the thought police would refer you to the German law, summarized at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial#Germany) .

This of course is protected free speech in the US. Though we need only look at Abrams v. United States, Schenck v. United States and Debs v. United States to see how the Supreme Court once interpreted the First Amendment.</comment></comment>


Show HN: keysniffer – Linux kernel module to log pressed keys in debugfs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jarun/keysniffer <comment><USER2> > The module name has been crafted to blend-in with other kernel modules.

> keysniffer is intended to track your own devices and NOT to trespass on > others.

This sounds inconsistent...

<comment><USER3> I agree. Maybe he's implying something about linux being multi-user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you only need a logger for X11, but want it to be layout-agnostic, I wrote one of those: [https://github.com/anko/xkbcat](https://github.com/anko/xkbcat) It doesn't even need sudo, perhaps because X11 was written by hippies. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> You can counter this by creating a hook to scramble keys as they are typed. There are countless antiloggers out there and they're the first thing I install on any fresh distro. Why this antilogging technique is not the default in most so called 'hardened' systems is beyond me. Really low hanging fruit like the ability to log keys should be looked after first and not addressed at some future date when you realize 20+ years of keystrokes were siphoned off your machine.

<comment><USER6> Aren't anti-antiloggers equally easy to write? Countering an example keylogger is easy, but countering a production-ready keylogger, assuming that keylogger actually gets to load itself as a kernel module, doesn't seem like low-hanging fruit.

What's the threat model you have where evil kernel modules are installed on your machine, yet they _don 't_ do things like siphon off your files, read passwords out of the memory of running processes, add entries to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys if and only if the current process's name is "sshd", etc.?

<comment><USER5> In terms of a threat model, it includes any machine which acts as a hypervisor and as the old saying goes: If you don't trust the hypervisor, how can you trust any machine running in that hypervisor?

Antilogging is but one tiny component of defense in depth and worth investigating if you're doing anything interesting with a computer. 'Doing something interesting' although is not to be misconstrued as 'doing something bad'. It just means how can any meaningful work get done if low hanging fruit like keystrokes can (and are) being siphoned off?

It helps to see how machines are actually being compromised like this...I've seen it on my machine and sometimes entire office building are being siphoned like this. I typically report this, but I would much rather get to the root as to how it's possible in the first place :(

<comment><USER6> Huh, that doesn't match my intuitions at all (at least on UNIX-based OSes), so I'm pretty surprised and want to re-adjust my expectations. You're saying that you regularly see compromised machines that are running kernel-mode keyloggers, but _only_ keyloggers? What has the attack vector been, and do you know where they keys are being logged to?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> yc-kraln cat /dev/input ?

<comment><USER7> would that yield the same? (i am not able to try it at the moment)

<comment><USER8> Not really - in part because /dev/input is a directory, and in part because I _believe_ reading from /dev/input consumes the event, which would be less than ideal for a silent keylogger. ;)

(/dev/input/XXXX also gives more structured output than just raw key events IIRC.)

<comment><USER9> You can actually read keypresses from /dev/input/eventN to make a keylogger, I wrote a simple one in lua.

<comment><USER8> I sit corrected, thank you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Startram - maglev train to low earth orbit - <AUTHOR> http://www.gizmag.com/startram-maglev-to-leo/21700/ <comment><USER2> More practical on the moon - as per decades-earlier mass-driver concepts, in order to get raw materials into earth-lunar orbit. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_Driver_1></comment>


Apple confirms iPhones with older batteries will take hits in performance - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/12/20/16803190/iphone-slowdown-is-needed-but-also-a-problem <comment><USER2> So Apple, in order to improve performance degradation due to aging batteries, is... throttling device performance.

Consider me not sold on this line of reasoning. It might be more believable if there had been transparency on that _feature_ before it was found out. Say, if Apple auto-enabled low-power mode 100% of the time after X number of duty cycles. And allowed users to opt-out and simply run down the batter faster if desired. And it didn't happen to coincide with the drop-date for the next iPhone version quite so neatly.

So, color me skeptical on this one. Anyone aware of similar shenanigans on Samsung sets?

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing to do with batteries. Planned obsolescence. They want you to buy a new iPhone.

Next time I'm going to buy a generic smartphone, like a Xiaomi.</comment>


50 years after Apollo, conspiracy theorists are still howling at the 'moon hoax' - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/50-years-after-apollo-conspiracy-theorists-are-still-howling-at-the-moon-hoax/2019/05/23/ca5b4a3a-700e-11e9-9f06-5fc2ee80027a_story.html <comment><USER2> There always will be certain population that believes in conspiracy theories, magic, God and angels, trickle down economy, flat Earth so on and so forth.

There needs an invention in medicine to make these people rational.</comment>


The Empire the World Forgot - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20160309-the-empire-the-world-forgot <comment><USER2> I'm a little late, but anyway - I spent a couple of weeks in 2009 travelling around Eastern Turkey with a mate and visited Ani. Now I've seen a fair amount of impressive ruins in my time - Tunisia, Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, Israel - but I have to say Ani was one of the most haunting and evocative places I've ever been. We wandered around the site - which is not small - for a couple of hours, and the only other people we saw in that time were three other tourists and a bored teenage boy steering around a few hungry looking cows. There were stone blocks strewn around with ornate carvings, which in the UK would be in a museum, but instead the cows tramped amongst them chewing the grass. Across the border in Armenia - visible from the site - a bulldozer cleared an area for Russian gun emplacements, to add to those already installed. At one point we wandered into a half ruined church and as we did so a crow somewhere up in the roof started calling out.. It echoed around the ruin and the hairs on my neck stood on end.

Later on the wind picked up and storm clouds started to appear, and somehow that seemed a fitting end to my visit to this once great place, now reduced to desolation.

And I had to take a picture of the famous church of course! [http://imgur.com/DPSiDLW](http://imgur.com/DPSiDLW)

</comment><comment><USER3> Charming. "We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital activities at www.bbcworldwide.com."

I missed the part which explains why I'm not allowed to read it? I don't see what a TV license fee (which I don't pay anyway as I don't watch TV) has to do with a website.

The bizzare thing is someone made this exact complaint about BBC Future, whose situation is legally identical to BBC Travel, and in response they simply made it accessible (it now carries a banner).

[http://halfblog.net/2013/01/16/why-is-this-bbc-website- not-a...](http://halfblog.net/2013/01/16/why-is-this-bbc-website-not- available-in-the-uk/) [http://www.bbc.com/future](http://www.bbc.com/future)

</comment><comment><USER4> Just an interesting fact, General Pyotr Bagration ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Bagration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Bagration) ) was one of the heroes of Napoleonic Wars.

He was also from Bagratid dynasty that ruled the city of Ani.

<comment><USER5> Yup, Bagratunis were among the longest reigning dynasties in the region (in all of Europe & Middle East, AFAIK). The last name still pops up even today, in various dialectal forms. Like this Lebanese-Armenian politician: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karim_Pakradouni](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karim_Pakradouni)

Oh, and this dude: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/prince-ioane-bagrationi- mukhrane...](https://www.linkedin.com/in/prince-ioane-bagrationi-mukhraneli- prince-of-georgia-9b384422)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yup, I'm pretty well-traveled, and this is arguably the most beautiful place I've been, especially by bicycle, and certainly among the least touristed of anyone's short list.

</comment><comment><USER7> Behind any fallen empire are systemic failures.

Having lived through the systemic failures, were countless bit players who looked around then basically said, "Apres moi, le deluge!"

Behind every mass atrocity and war are resource scarcity situations brought about by systemic failure and/or natural disaster.

</comment><comment><USER8> Wow! Eerie photographs. Reminded me of the game Zork, circa late '90s.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well that sucks...

> We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK as it is part of our > international service and is not funded by the licence fee. It is run > commercially by BBC Worldwide, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the BBC, the > profits made from it go back to BBC programme-makers to help fund great new > BBC programmes. You can find out more about BBC Worldwide and its digital > activities at www.bbcworldwide.com.

<comment><USER10> I don't get it. What prevents bbc worldwide to make money from UK viewers?

<comment><USER11> I don't get it either. But I guess they are are concerned about Mr. Disgusted, Cheltenham complaining: "I don't see why I have to pay my license fee AND suffer these interminable commercials".

Come to think of it, it may be in the BBC's Charter that their content be free from commercials (to license payers). If so, they are contractually bound to hide the commercials or, keeping it simple, just not provide content with commercials to license-payers.

Of course, most of the BBC's internet accessible content has always been geo- restricted in the opposite direction. So they have form there.

<comment><USER12> BBC.com shows ads to people geolocated outside the UK. Most of that content is not blocked to the UK.

Here we see something a bit different - the article is blocked to people in the UK.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/faq/](http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc.com/faq/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The title is misleading... Empires by definition are encompassing and large, not local and regional. The article does touch on the empires and kingdoms that have affected the location, though.

<comment><USER5> Armenia was an empire at some point, just not at the time of Ani. The title could be referring to Armenia in general, since it's most definitely an empire the world forgot about :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Those recommending a VPN: what should I get? Preferable something within an order of magnitude $1/mo, obviously featuring end-to-end encryption, perhaps even something I could torrent through? ;)

<comment><USER15> There is a huge list of vpn services compared a couple of days ago on Hn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> "The church also housed a fragment of the True Cross, upon which Jesus was crucified."

What is this, grammatically? It's hard to believe the person who wrote it believed it was literally true, so is it a metaphor?

<comment><USER17> > The True Cross is the name for physical remnants which, by a Christian > tradition, are believed to be from the cross upon which Jesus was > crucified.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Cross](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Cross)

<comment><USER16> I know what it is, but seeing it in this context is like reading an article about the archaeology of Mount Ararat and finding the casual statement that Noah landed the Ark there.

Edit: Jesus, how could someone downvote that?

<comment><USER18> If you google "Mount Ararat Archaeology", all of the top results are about Noah and his famous Ark

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If it is regional, it is not an empire...

China was an empire, and was forgotten. Today I could go to the book store and buy "Historic Atlas of the world" that completely ignore China.

I have lived in China and of course the Chinese propaganda does the opposite: They consider Confucius the best philosopher of the world(because is the only one they have with Universal status), and what Europe only did was copying China innovations, and so on.

I used to like the bbc in the past.

<comment><USER20> >> If it is regional, it is not an empire...

Armenia was an Empire long before Ani. List of Largest Empires in Wikipedia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires) If you look at "Ancient Empires" section, there are only 6 empires and both Armenia and China are in the list.

>> China was an empire, and was forgotten.

I do not think that is the case. I have never seen any respectable historical atlas that does not have China. Also there are Hollywood movies depicting China in times when it was (or was becoming) an Empire, so you can hardly call it forgotten.

The main reason that Chinese Empire is not forgotten and won't be anytime soon, is that China is still a major power with 1.357 billion population.</comment></comment>


Late Night Thoughts on Reading Scientology (2011) - <AUTHOR> https://arcsecond.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/late-night-thoughts-on-reading-scientology/

<comment><USER2> I am not a Scientologist, but I have read a fair bit about it --not all the bashing, but actual information about it, including some of L. Ron's books. Perhaps the organization itself is as sleazy as everyone says -- I have never had any direct contact with the church -- but the ideas it presents aren't all that crazy and could be quite useful. At worst I would say some of the ideas are overly naive or simplistic, but nonetheless mostly harmless. At best, it is easy to see how it really could help a lot of people find a better life.</comment>